Wednesday, November 09, 2005

Real English vs. Artificial Esperanto

Although the gap between the positions of English and Esperanto is wide, the choice between them is nowadays very difficult.Esperanto is the best known of all artificial languages ever used. It was invented on the basis of Russian, Yiddish, Polish, French, German, English, Latin and Greek languages by a Polish oculist Ludwig Zamenhof, and was first introduced in 1887, and since that time its popularity never decreases. Esperanto is an easy language to learn, and what is needed to achieve fluency is a simple memory work.Today Esperanto with a total of 8 million speakers is frequently encountered at international conferences. The Universal Esperanto Organization publishes several journals and newspapers and there is a large translated literature in addition to original work written in the language. However, despite its popularity, Esperanto has failed to achieve official status as an international language due to a lot of opposition of those who favor English as a world language and from the supporters of other artificial languages.The supporters of English view Esperanto as both unrealistic and politically unattainable language, whereas English is regarded as highly prestigious and by no means dominant language, and they seldom admit such political problems and hindrances as antiglobal and national movement that prevent English form its world dominance. Moreover, English is not an easy language to learn because of a large number of exceptions to any rule. It is one of such languages, which for many seems easy, at the beginning, but then the bridge between basic knowledge and mastery takes a long time to cross, and for many learning English is a waste of time, energy and money. Some people see one universal language as an ideal and I fully subscribe to that view. If we all spoke the same language then the barriers to understanding would come down and the world might be a safer and happier place. On balance then, I feel that the artificial language like Esperanto would be an ideal choice, as it carries no cultural baggage, and therefore, being a planned language, facilitates communication among people of different lands and cultures on the equal footing, without having the usual cultural advantage of any natural language. Nevertheless, it should be admitted that Esperanto is far from being an ideal artificial communication system, and to achieve a status of truly international language and to function appropriately, Esperanto should be perfected in terms of it grammatical structure and lexical potential.